A Lakewood police officer was killed and three other officers were wounded Thursday evening after a gunman opened fire on an RTD bus near Wadsworth Boulevard and West Colfax Avenue. The suspect was also killed in the exchange, turning a search tied to a crash hours earlier into a deadly confrontation in Lakewood, Colorado.
The officer killed was Nicholas Graham, a seven-member veteran of the police force. Lakewood police said two officers were released from the hospital Friday and a third remained hospitalized but was recovering. A bystander was also wounded, though police did not say how badly.
What makes the case especially jarring is how it began. Lakewood police said agents were looking for a man suspected in a hit-and-run crash near W. 13th Avenue and Kipling Street about three hours earlier, after witnesses gave a detailed description. Officers later saw the man board a northbound RTD bus on Route 76 at West Colfax Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard.
The department’s use of the word agents is not a flourish. It says the Lakewood Department of Public Safety was modeled after the FBI when it was founded in 1970, and its employees originally wore suits rather than uniforms. That history is part of why officers there still use the title today, even in a case that unfolded in plain sight at a busy intersection.
Lakewood police said the suspect, identified by authorities as Gabriel Steven Garcia, turned and fired at officers after they boarded the bus at 6:32 p.m. Thursday. Garcia, 34, was a parolee with a felony conviction for assaulting a police officer in 2017, according to police. The officers returned fire and killed him.
Arianna McKibbin was celebrating her 13th birthday when she saw the shooting from a car stopped at a red light with her grandmother. She said, “We heard gunfire go off,” and later added that she was scared because she had never seen gunshots before and it felt out of the blue. Her view is the sharpest reminder that the violence did not happen in a sealed police encounter, but in the middle of an ordinary Thursday evening in Lakewood, Colorado.
The immediate question now is not whether police will say more about the gunfire. It is what led to the earlier hit-and-run crash, and whether that chain of events could have ended any other way before an officer died, three others were shot, and a bus ride became the scene of a fatal standoff.
